14 - Mongrel Attunement in White God

Summary

This chapter begins from the question of where we might locate political aesthetics in contemporary European cinema, and in particular the challenge of escaping the various modes of liberal realism that dominate representations of economic crisis and migration. In an attempt to avoid what Karl Schoonover has argued to be neorealism's collaboration with the hegemonic forces of the post-war transnational order (2012: xiv–xviii), my argument avoids the kind of neo-neorealist films that invoke this distancing spectacle of imperilled bodies. It considers instead the cinematic potential of an aesthetic of attunement, drawing on contemporary theories of mood. Despite the obvious importance of mood in the experience of cinema, there is relatively little attention paid to it in film theory. Stimmung, or attunement, forms a key part of Lotte Eisner’s account of German Expressionism, and this theoretical interest in the expressive capacities of the medium proposes atmosphere as a central modality of film form (1969: 199–206). In his more recent exploration of the concept, Robert Sinnerbrink comments that ‘the aesthetics of mood are curiously overlooked today’ (2012: 148), arguing that the insights of classical film theorists such as Eisner and Béla Balázs have not been sufficiently taken up in relation to contemporary film.

Where we do find the two together, however, is in recent cultural studies work on mood, which often turns to cinema as a social space. Ben Highmore, for instance, writes about how light, sound and the organisation of space work to create atmospheres, using the movie theatre as an example (2013: 428–30). If mood in this Heideggerian sense of Stimmung is directionless, then a filmtheoretical focus on attunement could speak more directly of subject and object. In cinematic terms, it conjures questions of spectatorship, identification and the politics of the image, as well as a close attention to the formal registration of light, sound and space. As Sinnerbrink puts it, cinematic mood ‘is not simply a subjective experience or private state of mind; it describes, rather, how a (fictional) world is expressed or disclosed via a shared affective attunement orienting the spectator within that world’ (2012: 148).

Attunement is thus an apt concept for analysing cinematic effects. Equally relevant for my purpose, however, is the frequency with which scholars of attunement invoke the public politics of migration.